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eyes,’ Crawfie wrote. Once the engagement became official the royal machine got under
way again to provide the glamour that had been missing from the public stage since
1939. The royal dressmaker, Norman Hartnell, designed a fairy-princess dress in ivory
silk satin garlanded with white roses of York in raised pearls, entwined with ears of
corn embroidered in crystal and interspersed with embroidered star flowers and orange
blossom, tulle on satin and satin on tulle. Wedding presents came from all over the
world, ranging from the magnificent – a thoroughbred filly from the Aga Khan and a
hunting lodge from the people of Kenya – to the prosaic – hundreds of pairs of nylon
stockings (a rare commodity in those days of clothes rationing and austerity); even a
turkey from a lady in Brooklyn sent to Princess Elizabeth ‘because she lives in England
and they have nothing to eat in England’. Among the 1,500 presents on display at St
James’s Palace was a woven cotton tray-cloth made specially by Gandhi at Mountbatten’s
suggestion, misidentified by Queen Mary, who was not in any way favourably
disposed towards the Mahatma, as a loin-cloth. ‘Such an indelicate gift… what a horrible
thing,’ she exclaimed. Philip attempted to silence her comments by loud praise of
Gandhi, but Queen Mary merely pursed her lips and moved on in disapproving silence.
On her next visit to the display Princess Margaret nipped on ahead and managed to
hide the offending object behind some other presents. Otherwise, Queen Mary was in
her element; the marriage of her favourite granddaughter involving as it did two
members of the ‘Old Family’, as she liked to call the Hanoverians to distinguish them
from Albert’s more lowly Saxe-Coburg-Gotha line, was precisely the dynastic alliance she
had hoped for. She amused herself by working out tables of their relationship: third
cousins through Queen Victoria, second cousins once removed through King Christian IX
of Denmark, fourth cousins once removed through collateral descendants of George III.
Despite the absence of the Germans there was a respectable gathering of royalty,
many of them relations: the King and Queen of Denmark, the Kings of Norway,
Romania and Iraq, the Queen of the Hellenes, the Princess Regent and Prince Bernhard
of the Netherlands, the Prince Regent of Belgium, the ex-King and Queen of Yugoslavia,
the Pretender to the Spanish throne, the Count of Barcelona and his wife, Prince Jean
and Princess Elisabeth of Luxembourg, ex-Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain, and ex-
Queen Helen of Romania. It was a ‘week of gaieties such as the court had not seen for
years’, Queen Mary’s lady-in-waiting wrote. ‘There were parties at St James’s Palace to
view the wedding presents, a Royal dinner-party for all the foreign Royalties, and an
evening party at Buckingham Palace which seemed after the years of austerity like a
scene out of a fairy tale.’ It was the first post-war royal get-together on a grand scale,
although the same cast (again without the German relations) had assembled the
previous year for the wedding in Romsey of Mountbatten’s eldest daughter, Patricia, to
his former ADC, John, Lord Brabourne. ‘Saw many old friends,’ Queen Mary recorded in
her diary two nights before the wedding. ‘I stood from 9.30 till 12.15 a.m.!!! Not bad for
80.’ She did not mention the only untoward incident; perhaps she was not aware of it:
according to Sir John Colville, ‘an Indian Rajah became uncontrollably drunk and
assaulted the Duke of Devonshire (who was sober)’. At least, she could reflect, the